Jan Yoors, The Gypsies.
http://www.waveland.com/Titles/Yoors.htm
When he was 12, Jan Yoors–the son of a bohemian belgian couple–befriended and eventually ran away with a family of gypsies, living with them for a summer and off and an again for years. This was in the thirties before the war, so the life he experienced was centuries old but only to last for another decade. His writing is vivid and perceptive. It’s horrifying to think that many of the gypsies who people his memoire died at the hands of the nazis only a few years later. It’s an extraordinary book.
The Gypsies
Jan Yoors
At the age of twelve, Jan Yoors ran away from his cultural Belgian family to join a wandering band, a kumpania, of Gypsies. For ten years, he lived as one of them, traveled with them from country to country, shared both their pleasures and their hardships—and came to know them as no one, no outsider, ever has. Here, in this firsthand and highly personal account of an extraordinary people, Yoors tells the real story of the Gypsies’ fascinating customs and their never-ending struggle to survive as free nomads in a hostile world. He vividly describes the texture of their daily life: the Gypsies as lovers, spouses, parents, healers, and mourners; their loyalties and enmities; their moral and ethical beliefs and practices; their language and culture; and the history and traditions behind their fierce pride.
The exultant celebrations, the daring frontier crossings, the yearly horse fairs, the convoluted business deals in which Gypsy shrewdness combined with all the apparatus of modern technology are all brought to life in this memorable portrait of the most romanticized, yet most maligned and least-known people on earth. An insider’s story, The Gypsies lifts the veil of secrecy that for so long has enshrouded this race of strangers in our midst.
256 pages, $17.50 list; ISBN 0-88133-305-0
He wrote another book called The Crossing which recounts his experiences with the resistance during the war years, when he was engaged in trying to help gypsies and others get over the borders to safety.
I read his first book twenty years ago and and my battered copy is much the worse for wear, but it’s been reprinted recently. The Crossing is still out of print, and I’ve recently ordered a used copy, although I haven’t read it.
Yoors ended up as a successful painter/scultor/tapestry maker/photographer in NYC, and died a few years ago.
Now I am seriously in need of some mind expansion.
